STARKVILLE – Trying to harness AI as an institution is sort of like holding a piece of slime, said Julie Jordan, senior adviser for AI and data governance for Mississippi State University.
“You try to grab hold of it, and it just kind of runs over,” Jordan told Starkville Rotary Club on Monday at Hilton Garden Inn. “That’s kind of what’s happening with AI everywhere. It’s everywhere, and we don’t really know what to do about it, and it’s happening at a pace which is almost indescribable.”
Jordan, who previously served as the university’s vice president for research and economic development for six years, was named to the newly created position in November with the goal of leading strategic AI initiatives at MSU.
Additionally, Jordan oversees the development and implementation of comprehensive data governance, or managing data so it can be best utilized by AI. Both responsibilities aim to advance research and education while ensuring the ethical and effective use of data and AI, a MSU press release said.
“We’re way past the debate of whether we should or shouldn’t (use AI),” Jordan told The Dispatch after the Rotary meeting. “It’s now, ‘How do we do it responsibly and ethically so that mankind and societies adapt?’”
The university has already taken steps to implement AI academically, Jordan said, pointing to the creation of undergraduate and graduate degree programs in artificial intelligence as well as a bachelor’s degree program in data science.
“We’re already ahead in the formal academic sense, but now what we’re doing is, we’re integrating AI across other subject areas,” she said. “Because whether you are in finance or in marketing or you’re in agriculture, you’re going to use AI in your work when you graduate, and that’s what we need to make sure that our students are prepared when they graduate.”
The next step, she said, is catching up thousands of employees and students to products in an industry that moves faster than most.
“Different from your businesses, at any academic institutions right now, … we have to think about AI as a subject that we teach our students to use responsibly, and we also have to think of it as a tool that we’re all trying to use to do our jobs,” Jordan said.
That includes creating opportunities for students to familiarize themselves with using AI in ethical, responsible ways.
“In a secure, controlled environment within Mississippi State’s boundaries – sort of our box of data information – they can access those tools,” Jordan said, specifically noting Google’s Gemini, Open AI’s Chat-GPT and, soon, Anthropic’s Claude as well.
Operationally, that includes using AI to work more efficiently. That starts with using AI as a personal assistant to speed up work for employees, from business managers to recruiters.
“We can speed up everything we do with having an AI assistant help us along the way,” Jordan said. “The personal assistant is where we kind of get versed, and then along the way, the agents will just do things for us. First of all, it’s speeding up my workload, and then down the road, it will be speeding up several people and an entire workload.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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